History of Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism

Author: Hou Wailu
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 1997-10-01
Features: Committed to publishing academic books domestically has always been our consistent purpose. In the field of the history of philosophy, with the strong support of generations of experts and scholars, we have published many significant works that preserve academic value and rich intellectual treasures. To make these books more systematic and organized, facilitating research and reference for scholars old and new, and contributing to cultural and intellectual heritage, we have compiled them into the Library of Historians of Philosophy. Philosophy is the "living soul of civilization" (Marx). We hope the Library of Historians of Philosophy can contribute to the prosperity of philosophy and the progress of civilization. We also expect this series to continuously add new works.
In 1959, when we compiled the fourth volume of A Comprehensive History of Chinese Thought, we began researching the Neo-Confucianism of the Song and Ming dynasties. Due to the constraints of the book's format and length, we could not thoroughly analyze this section, merely writing about a few representative Confucian scholars. At that time, I began to contemplate compiling A History of Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism to elucidate the emergence and evolution of Neo-Confucianism and its role in the history of Chinese thought, creating a specialized work distinct yet connected to the broader intellectual history. It was not until twenty years later that we began executing this research plan.
After completing the second volume of An Outline of the History of Chinese Thought in 1980, Comrade Qiu Hansheng had already compiled the chapter titles and outline for A History of Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism. We organized discussions with colleagues from the Research Room of Chinese Thought at the Institute of History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and assigned chapters to different authors. During the era when the "Gang of Four" dominated, Comrade Hansheng quietly studied numerous primary sources on Neo-Confucianism under extremely perilous conditions, offering valuable insights into its emergence and evolution. This made significant contributions to our compilation of A History of Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism.
After the "Gang of Four" was overthrown, social sciences flourished. In recent years, many works on Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism have been published domestically, and we have also read research findings from overseas. These have inspired us in our compilation of A History of Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism. After three years of effort, the first volume of A History of Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism is now completed, and work on the second volume is ongoing.
Neo-Confucianism of the Song and Ming dynasties was the dominant ideology of the late feudal society, with "human nature and the Way of Heaven" as its central theme—a philosophical issue that also touched upon politics, morality, education, and religion. Neo-Confucianism was primarily based on Confucianism but also incorporated elements of Buddhism and Daoism. It emerged and developed as a new intellectual tradition on the foundation of the fusion and permeation of the three teachings (Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism) during the Tang Dynasty. Neo-Confucianism permeated all aspects of late feudal social and political life, becoming an authoritative and dominant force, a heavy burden on the heads of the working people. Politically, it was a turbid stream in the history of thought. Despite this, Neo-Confucianism absorbed a vast amount of traditional and foreign culture, marking a new stage in the history of thought after the Pre-Qin philosophers, the Han Dynasty's Confucian classics, the Wei-Jin School of Metaphysics, and the Tang Dynasty's Buddhism. It contains valuable content worthy of reference for later generations, which requires careful scrutiny using Marxist perspectives and methods rather than a dismissive one-size-fits-all approach.
Therefore, in this work, we do not merely describe the thoughts of individual Neo-Confucian scholars in isolation but attempt to elucidate the historical process of the emergence and evolution of Neo-Confucianism and the positions of the scholars within that process. Neo-Confucianism is divided into two major schools: the Cheng-Zhu School and the Lu-Wang School of Mind. They debated and influenced each other, with a trend toward convergence between Zhu and Lu. This intellectual evolution is also a key focus of our research.
As is well known, Zhu Xi was the synthesizer of Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism. It was only through Zhu Xi that Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism established its grand scale and unique system in academia, influencing later intellectual development for five or six hundred years, with its legacy still felt today. This raises a series of important questions: What were the historical reasons for the formation of Neo-Confucianism? How did Zhu Xi achieve this synthesis? Why did Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism have such a profound influence in the late feudal society of China? How did Wang Yangming's School of Mind rise? Why did Neo-Confucianism decline during the Ming-Qing transition? How does the internal logic of Neo-Confucianism's development relate to the social development of the time? We have offered our own perspectives on these questions and presented them to the academic community for reference and discussion.
It should also be noted that in a specialized work on the history of Neo-Confucianism, it is not enough to write only the most famous scholars. There are also many less-known scholars who played significant roles in the evolution of Neo-Confucianism or in the transmission of its intellectual lineage, and their historical contributions must not be overlooked. Their rightful positions should be accurately described. The study of Yuan Dynasty Neo-Confucianism has long been neglected. In reality, there is no shortage of materials on Yuan Dynasty Neo-Confucianism, and its evolution and development are quite clear. In this monograph, we have dedicated a separate chapter to this topic. I believe that only by understanding the characteristics of Yuan Dynasty Neo-Confucianism can we grasp how Song Dynasty Neo-Confucianism transitioned through this intermediate stage to become Ming Dynasty Neo-Confucianism.
Furthermore, the related discipline of I Ching mathematics must not be ignored. In summary, the history of Neo-Confucianism is neither a collection of biographies of Neo-Confucian scholars nor a few chapters in a comprehensive history of thought, but rather a historical account of intellectual evolution shaped by the specific conditions of the Song and Ming dynasties, with its own distinct characteristics. In this work, we attempt to capture this historical process, but due to limitations in our abilities, we may not have fully succeeded, and shortcomings and errors are inevitable.
I believe that to accurately portray the emergence and evolution of Neo-Confucianism in historical terms, researchers must not guide their work with Neo-Confucian thought itself, writing Neo-Confucianism from the perspective of Neo-Confucianism. This approach cannot reveal the true nature of historical development and may even distort the process. If one merely remains at the level of progressive scholars in the feudal society, such as Huang Zongxi and Quanzuwang, at most, they could compile works like A Record of Confucian Schools from Song to Yuan, which, while remarkable in the Qing Dynasty, are merely historical compilations and far from a scientific history of thought or a scientific history of Neo-Confucianism.
The ancients had their own historical limitations. We must inherit the fine legacy of our predecessors while also innovating and developing further. If we adopt bourgeois historical perspectives and methods to write works like Liang Qichao's A History of Chinese Thought in the Past Three Centuries, this would still not constitute a scientific history of Neo-Confucianism. Our research must be strictly guided by Marxist theory. Marxism is a scientific worldview and methodology. Over the past sixty years since the May Fourth Movement, the history of China has proven that only by guiding historical research with Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought can it become a science. Only by doing so can we restore Neo-Confucianism to its true form and understand its role and significance in the history of Chinese thought.
Of course, in practical research, whether one can accurately apply Marxist methods to analyze historical issues depends on academic discussion to learn from strengths, correct errors, and improve.